It's all too easy to forget how funny Ellen can be. And how amazing she is.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
This Blows My Mind
While the US media/blogosphere rages on with the controversy of Miss California's stance for 'opposite marriage', my home country saw it's own public debate on the rights of the individual versus the 'community' via the theatre that was the takeover of women's rights advocacy group AWARE by members of a fundamental Christian church.
(Background on this issue can be found here.)
Singapore has such a complex social structure when it comes to 'homegrown' values and the island's aspirations of being a world-class city. How do you reconcile the modernity that one of the richest independent nations in the world enjoys with archaic laws that are essentially holdovers from when the British ruled Singapore? Is this truly a conservative-versus-progressive debate? How do the rules of civil society thrive when religious values are given a moral advantage?
Some might say that this is the liberal left being self-serving, especially when these laws pertain to 'acts of gross indecency' - legal parlance for sodomy - but as demonstrated by these women at the Extraordinary General Meeting, the rights of ALL minorities are affected when the rights of any one minority group is
impinged.
Such an airing of opposing views in defense of such a 'controversial' matter has never happened in Singapore, as far as I can recall, and gives me hope that the country that I was born in might indeed have made the first steps towards joining the civil societies of the world.
There's still some ways to go before Singapore will ever have anything close to this.
But that's OK. Baby steps.
(Background on this issue can be found here.)
Singapore has such a complex social structure when it comes to 'homegrown' values and the island's aspirations of being a world-class city. How do you reconcile the modernity that one of the richest independent nations in the world enjoys with archaic laws that are essentially holdovers from when the British ruled Singapore? Is this truly a conservative-versus-progressive debate? How do the rules of civil society thrive when religious values are given a moral advantage?
Some might say that this is the liberal left being self-serving, especially when these laws pertain to 'acts of gross indecency' - legal parlance for sodomy - but as demonstrated by these women at the Extraordinary General Meeting, the rights of ALL minorities are affected when the rights of any one minority group is
impinged.
Such an airing of opposing views in defense of such a 'controversial' matter has never happened in Singapore, as far as I can recall, and gives me hope that the country that I was born in might indeed have made the first steps towards joining the civil societies of the world.
There's still some ways to go before Singapore will ever have anything close to this.
But that's OK. Baby steps.
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